Yes the term brings smiles to some and fear to others. Smiles are the folks that find out I am not heading their way, just in case you were wondering. But to get back on track I will be heading north in Nov. to visit with LC and her clan in Canada. And yes they even know that I am coming and they are not complaining. It should be a good time just visiting and meeting folks and having fun for a week. I would tell you the name of the town but it is so small that even Google Earth has no pictures of it. Talk about a well hidden gem. I plan to post news as time allows and Watch the Gallery for pictures of the trip. Now back to our regular broadcasting.

Technorati Tags: Personal

FuriousBalancing writes “MacNN is reporting that Canadians may soon pay a small tax on every legal music store download. This fee is the work of a measure proposed by the Copyright Board of Canada. About two cents would be added to every song downloaded, with 1.5 cents being added to album downloads. Streaming services and subscriptions would also be taxed, to the tune of about 6% of the monthly fee. Most interesting – the tax would be retroactively applied to every transaction processed since 1996. ‘The surcharge would help compensate artists for piracy, according to SOCAN’s reasoning. The publishing group draws similarities between this and a 21-cent fee already applied to blank CDs in the country; the right to copy a song from an online store demands the same sort of levy applied to copying a retail CD, SOCAN argues. The tax may have a significant impact for online stores such as iTunes and Canada-based Puretracks, which will have to factor the amount both into future and past sales.’ The full text of the measure is available in PDF format.”

Okay leave it the politicians to think of a way to tax people for things they happened in 1996 for goodness sake! And just when I thought that there was not a chance that the US politicians could be out “dumbed” by anyone here comes the Canadian Politicians, Baldy

Technorati tags: News

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada May Tax Legal Music Downloads

As most users of more than one distro know the headaches of attempting to use a RPM in Debian or a tzg in Mandriva. Well along comes Nixstaller it is a open source installer that will work with various UNIX systems.

Main Features

* Three different installer frontends, powered by GTK+2, FLTK and ncurses.
* Support for many common UNIX like systems (see table below)
* Can be fully translated (English and Dutch translations are already provided)
* The installation files can be compressed with lzma, gzip and bzip2.
* The installation files that should be used can depend on the current system.
* Lua support is provided to configure the installer and to program the installation procedure. This allows very flexible configurations.
* Very few dependencies: the end user and install creator only needs one of the supported systems. For compilation SCons (and python) is also required.

A program like this is one possible cure to the install woes of the average Linux user and a step in the right way to making Linux more usable by the average user.

Read more here

Technorati Tags: Linux

Twine it.
Don’t just share it. Twine it.
Don’t just organize it. Twine it.
Don’t just find it. Twine it.

Twine is a new service that intelligently helps you share, organize and find information with people you trust.

Source: twine.com

~LC

Technorati Tags: Twine

Flock is a social web browser based on the open source project Mozilla. It can be called a social browser, because of its tight integration with many social networking and social media services. Changing the purpose of a browser from a non-integrated window into the web to a more participatory portal to you favorite interactive sites, Flock seeks to gain significant market share by bringing your favorite social applications one step closer.

With Flock users can do many community involved activities such as uploading photos directly to Photobucket and Flickr, accessing news aggregation services, or using blogging tools. A full list of social media/networking extensions for Flock can be found here.

Downloads available for Linux, Mac & Windows

Source: crunchbase

~LC

Technorati Tags: Flock

What do you get when you cross a Firefox with a chameleon?

An open-source Web browser whose user interface is adapted to the look of the operating system it’s running on. One change planned for the upcoming Firefox version 3, code-named Gran Paradiso, is this more native appearance.

Source: c|net

~LC

FlickrSave is a GIMP plugin which adds an option to directly upload a picture to Flickr. It uses Christophe Beauregard’s flickr_upload tool as a backend. The plugin supports setting title, description, tags and privacy, and works in both GIMP-2.2 and GIMP-2.4RC under Linux

Source: anbits

~LC

Technorati Tags: Flicker, Gimp

After more than a decade on the air, Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” has its own online home.

http://www.dailyshow.com to go live at noon EST Thursday.

Source: Yahoo News

~LC

Survey to pinpoint developer focus for global Linux desktop adoption

The 2007 Linux Desktop Survey will be conducted from October 17, 2007 – November 30, 2007. Survey results will be made publicly available shortly after it concludes. To take the survey, please visit:

https://www.linux-foundation.org/en/2007ClientSurvey

Source: Linux Foundation

~LC

Technorati Tags: Linux Foundation

Apple Inc. will allow third-party applications on the iPhone, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a posting on its website Wednesday.

Source: Yahoo News

~LC

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone